The Brotherhood of the Knights of the Blackpudding, a colourful French food fraternity visited Kanturk in celebration of the Gold Medal Winning Black Pudding by McCarthy’s of Kanturk.
The brotherhood paraded up Strand Street, with their banners and ceremonial dress, accompanied by local ilen pipe players to arrive at the Gourmet food festival outside McCarthy’s premises on Main Street.
Representing Good Food Ireland, Peter Ward of Country Choice is no stranger to the finest Irish food. Indeed, he was declared Good Food Ireland Person of the Year in 2009. He said, “I say to people, don’t make anything exotic at all, just make something really really good that will bring people to your door. Here Jack McCarthy has, with a bucket of blood in either hand, made something really really really good.” He went on to say that, “It is great that our authorities are coming round to realise that the expertise of the producer is the greatest safe guard we can have in the production of food in Ireland.”
Jean Claude, chair of the fraternity spoke, “The Black pudding fraternity has been in existence for nearly fifty years and in that time we have seen over 30,000 different sorts of black pudding. We very happy to know, and to see, how much the Irish people enjoy black pudding and how the Irish pork butcher made a really good black pudding.”
The food festival included stalls from local businesses such as IRD Duhallow Community Food Services, Cork City’s On the Pigs Back” and new local enterprise www.easyentertaining.ie, and also drew gourmet emporiums from further afield, Sheridan’s Cheese Mongers, Mannings Emporium, Soul Bakery and Gubbeen Farmhouse to name just some of the stall holders.